Who doesn’t love a list? At the start of the summer, we brought you a fantastic collection of reading recommendations on Personal and Business Development. Now, as we start wrapping up another year, we have a final fabulous feast of a blog post for you. What BETTER way to help you end 2024 and start 2025 than to treat you to another cracking cornucopia of book suggestions to inform, inspire and motivate you on this rollercoaster we call life. 

Whether it’s business success stories, eye-opening philosophies on health and happiness, helpful dives into focus and productivity, riveting insights into motivation and mindset or practical strategies for success…the following smorgasbord of book ideas has it all. 

New year, new books! So, read it and reap.

1. Awaken the Giant Within  – Tony Robbins

From the author: “I know that no matter where you are in your life, you want more! No matter how well you’re already doing or how challenged you now may be, deep inside you there lies a belief that your experience of life can and will be much greater than it already is. You are destined for your own unique form of greatness.” Awaken the Giant Within is the ultimate programme for improving the quality of every aspect of life, be it personal, business, physical or emotional. Focusing on the power of conscious decision-making, Robbins provides game-changing strategies and tools for taking control of one’s emotions, finances and relationships, with the goal of helping readers immediately become the masters of their own fate.

2. Creating Your Best Life: the Ultimate Life List Guide – Caroline Adams Miller & Michael B Frisch

For the first time, the science of positive psychology meets the science of goal accomplishment. Comprehensive and evidence-based, Creating Your Best Life breaks new ground in revealing how happiness and success are interconnected. With dozens of interactive exercises and quizzes, it helps readers identify their most cherished needs, ambitions, and wishes so they can take control of their environment and maximise their chances of success. The authors’ unique life list coaching provides step by step explanations of how to set goals in 16 key areas, inspire people to live their lives more consciously, productively, and joyfully.

3. Deep Work – Cal Newport

The concept of deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task – making us better at what you do and enabling us to achieve more in less time. Developing a deep work practice is literally one of the most important habits to adopt, yet most people have lost this ability, instead spending their days in a frantic email and social media blur. This life-changing book presents a mix of cultural criticism, compelling manifesto and immediately actionable advice for cultivating focus and achieving success across all aspects of life. One of its key lessons is that it is wrong to view deep work as yet another thing to cram into the schedule. Instead, deciding to truly commit to it transforms your time, resulting in getting through shallow work faster, being more present in your home life and preventing wasted time from switching between tasks.

4. Delivering Happiness, a Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose – Tony Hsieh

Paying brand-new employees a four figure amount to quit, making customer service the responsibility of the entire company, focusing on company culture as the top priority,, encouraging employees to grow personally and professionally, seeking to change the world… These were all Tony Hsieh’s standard operating procedures as CEO of online retailer Zappos. Delivering Happiness is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller about how Tony Hsieh applied the science of happiness and Positive Psychology principles to building a company that achieved $1bn in annual gross merchandise sales and became the highest-ranking newcomer in Fortune magazine’s 2009 “Best Companies to Work For” list. Sharing the lessons he has learned from life and his many businesses, Hsieh shows how a very different kind of corporate culture is a powerful model for achieving success – and how by concentrating on the happiness of those around you, you can dramatically increase your own…

5. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – David Allen

Author Daniel H. Pink, whose own book Drive made our previous list of 25 recommended books, says “I am a devout, card-carrying Getting Things Done true believer. The entire approach has boosted not only my productivity but also my wider well-being. But what amazes me just as much is how deeply GTD has taken hold around the world. . . . This is a genuine movement”. Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, Allen’s book has earned the label of ‘Bible of personal and business productivity. It is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organisational tools, seminars and offshoots. This updated version contains important perspectives on the new workplace.

6. The Examined Life, How We Lose and Find Ourselves – Stephen Groetz

Echoing Socrates’ statement that the unexamined life is not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on twenty-five years of work and over 50,000 hours of conversations to curate this illumination of the human experience. His book offers a collection of stories, including that of a woman who finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip, a young man who loses his wallet, the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer and the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he’s dying of cancer. The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.

7. Fear Less – Pippa Grange

We strive for success, only to realise that reaching our goals can actually feel strangely hollow. We aim for status that often turns out to be unsatisfying. The more we try to win – putting on a brave face for work or family – the more we risk losing ourselves and feeling unhappy. The culprit? Fear. It makes us anxious, shameful and can turn us into perfectionists. There is another way though…a way to find our true voice and win on our own terms. Building that open mindset is at the heart of this book by Dr Pippa Grange, the psychologist who helped the England football team reach the World Cup semi-finals for the first time in 28 years. Fear Less shows how we can find our real passions and deeper fulfilment by starting to shed fear and live without it (or less of it). Her simple manifesto enables us to replace stress with courage and connect with the people around us on a far deeper level. This type of success isn’t about trophies or beating others, it’s about winning at the very deepest level: from within. 

8. Good to Great – Jim Collins

Good to Great is a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel and is widely regarded as one of the most important business books ever written. Can a good company become a great one? If so, how? After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising – at times even shocking – to the modern mind. 

9. Grit: Why passion and resilience are the secrets to success – Angela Duckworth

What goes through your head when you fall down? Grit scrubs away preconceptions about how far our potential can take us and solves the riddle of how those not likely to succeed in fact do. At a time when our collective notion of success has shrunk to the point of being unrecognisable, Duckworth demonstrates how passion and perseverance matter as much as talent and intelligence. Far from simply urging us to work harder for the sake of working harder, Grit offers a perspective about true success coming from devoting ourselves to joyful and purposeful endeavours. Through masterful storytelling, latest science and and real-life examples, Duckworth takes us on an eye-opening journey to discover the true qualities that lead to outstanding achievement, showing the significant role of grit in achieving long-term goals.  

10. The Miracle Morning: The 6 Habits That Will Transform Your Life Before 8AM – Hal Elrod

After surviving multiple near-death experiences, Elrod is living proof that we can all overcome our challenges and make an impact in the world. His three million copies bestseller now occupies its place in the self development hall of fame, alongside Atomic Habits, The 5am Club and Make Your Bed. Elrod’s principle philosophy that getting everything we want out of life isn’t about doing more…it’s about becoming more. His revolutionary S.A.V.E.R.S. methodology is a simple yet effective step-by-step process to transform one’s life in as little as six minutes per day, by incorporating silence, affirmations, visualisation, exercise, reading and scribing. Try it and see for yourself!

11. The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté

The Myth of Normal delivers a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness and a pathway to health and healing. Nearly 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, one in five Canadians has high blood pressure and hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30% of Europe’s population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. Renowned physician Gabor Maté and his son Daniel dissect these alarming rates of chronic illness and general poor health in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems. For all its expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how modern culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system and undermines emotional balance. This book explores how our society breeds disease, challenges the prevailing understanding of ‘normal’ and uncovers the overlooked connection between trauma, stress and modern life’s pressures and our mental and physical health.

12. Outliers, The Story of Success –  Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers will change the way you think about your own life story and about what makes us all unique. Gladwell overturns conventional wisdom about genius to show us what makes an ordinary person an extreme overachiever. Why do some people achieve so much more than others? Can they lie so far out of the ordinary? In this provocative and inspiring book, Malcolm Gladwell looks at everyone from rock stars to professional athletes, software billionaires to scientific geniuses to show that the story of success is far more surprising and fascinating than we could ever have realised. It is as much about where we are from and what we do, as who we are and that nobody – not even a genius – ever makes it alone. 

13. The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Described by Oprah as essential spiritual teaching and one of the most valuable books she’s ever read, this guide to fulfillment and happiness has sold 16 millions copies since its 2001 release. The Power of Now talks about leaving our analytical minds, false created selves, and egos behind as part of the quest to create a liberated life. To facilitate this journey of self discovery and renewal, Tolle provides a simply-worded question and answer format that shows how to silence our thoughts and learn to live in the present moment – achieving a deeper sense of peace and fulfillment. 

14. Stop Overthinking, The Path to Calm – Nick Trenton

Overthinking is the biggest cause of unhappiness, trapping overthinkers in a never-ending thought loop and creating an exhausting mental prison of anxiety and stress. In Stop Overthinking, acclaimed author Nick Trenton walks readers through detailed, proven techniques to help rewire the brain, control one’s thoughts and change mental habits. The book provides scientific approaches that completely change the way we think and feel about ourselves by ending vicious thought patterns. This must-read is designed to help you stay present and keep your mind off things that don’t matter…and never will!

15. Thinking fast and slow – Daniel Kahneman

This groundbreaking psychology classic has sold over 10 million copies and changed the way we think about thinking. Distilling his life’s work and revolutionising our understanding of human behaviour, Nobel Prize-winning Kahneman (described as the godfather of behavioural science by Sunday Times) shows that there are two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking and slow, rational thinking. His book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error, bias and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical) and gives practical techniques that enable us all to improve our decision-making. Exploring the marvels and limitations of the human mind, this book analyses why we make the decisions we do, impacting how we see ourselves. 

16. Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers – Timothy Ferriss

Author of bestselling The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef, Tim Ferris has been dubbed “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his 100M-plus-download podcast The Tim Ferriss Show. Ferriss has talked to nearly 200 world-class performers from super celebs and athletes to legendary Special Ops commanders and black-market biochemists for his podcast. Tools of Titans contains the distilled tactics, life lessons and habits that his interviewees have shared. The focus is on actionable details, reflected in questions such as ‘what do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning?’, ‘what books have they gifted most to other people?’, ‘what are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field?’. Ferriss has vetted, explored and applied these tips to his own life in numerous ways. Now his readers can too. 

17. Rest Is Resistance: Free yourself from grind culture and reclaim your life – Tricia Hersey

Tricia Hersey is an artist, poet, theologian and community organiser. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organisation that examines rest as a form of resistance by curating sacred spaces for the community to rest via Collective Napping Experiences, immersive workshops, performance art installations and social media. Rest is Resistance looks at the liberating power of rest as a portal through which we return to ourselves. This revolutionary book illuminates certain critical truths, helping readers become aware of the toxic systems of our times, encouraging them to no longer accept living at a machine pace. Hersey offers us rest not instead of the incredible work we are doing but shows us that our dream space is sacred and rest is how we reclaim access to the wisdom there. 

We hope that these recommendations provide at least one must-read that helps you think constructively about the year ahead, set goals for work or simply open your mind to new concepts and information. Happy reading!

Got any book recommendations of your own that you’d like to suggest for one of our future lists? We’d love to hear from you! Message us on: Instagram or Facebook